Too Fast For Comfort wrote:the logical conclusion is that they don't really give two shakes about auxiliary revenue from concessions and retail

I'm not willing to go that far, I just think they like to mitigate risk / overhead by keeping staffing levels at an absolute minimum. Do they lose out on some revenue on busy days by doing that? Probably. Do they make more money over the course of a long season? I have no idea.

Yeah, honestly, I can't imagine how difficult it must be to keep a park staffed when you rely on seasonal help. The 365 park have an advantage, as they can offer year round employment, but they still run into the same problem: people who work for $8 an hour and want to work in parks generally tend to be students, so their services are inherently going to revolve around the school year. Its not just the cash outlay, but also the logistics of working with a limited labor pool.

DirkFunk wrote:Then they can move the staff back to primarily working on making it.

... or just cut those positions entirely and keep churning out food at the same glacial pace that they do now. My money is on that option.

I authentically think they'd do that. I chalk their low staffing up more to the job market being hyper competitive. I even think going year round at multiple parks is a sort of retention strategy (also revenue on infrastructure they have to maintain anyways) to replace increasing wages.

DirkFunk wrote:Then they can move the staff back to primarily working on making it.

... or just cut those positions entirely and keep churning out food at the same glacial pace that they do now. My money is on that option.

I authentically think they'd do that. I chalk their low staffing up more to the job market being hyper competitive. I even think going year round at multiple parks is a sort of retention strategy (also revenue on infrastructure they have to maintain anyways) to replace increasing wages.

But at the end of the day it still comes down to economics. Sure, they can claim that its a tight job market and maybe some people will believe them, but if they decided to pay them $18 an hour instead of $8 an hour and trained them well, people would be lining up outside the gates to work there. So it comes down to cost. They want to keep plowing $8 an hour into employees and that's that. So it will always be a tight labor market for them. Who wants to work for $8 an hour to get yelled at all day and stand in the sun?

I have a friend who wants to join me at Six Flags Magic Mountain on Sunday. I have a membership for Six Flags New England. Are there any discounts I can use for him? From the portal, it looks like my admission benefits seem exclusive to SFNE but I figured I'd check if anyone else has looked into this further.

He's leaning towards either a season pass or using a Tickets at Work discount.

The fingerprint a teenager gave to get a Six Flags season pass was enough of an injury to let him launch a class-action case, Illinois’s top court concluded Friday.

The case could have big implications for privacy protections, while also unleashing a rollercoaster ride for businesses bracing for a spike in class-action suits, experts say.

The decision only focused on whether a mere thumbprint — and no other alleged harm — made him an “aggrieved” person eligible to even bring a case. It didn’t discuss whether the amusement park was at fault for taking the print.

The ruling comes amid intense focus on Americans’ increasing loss of control over their personal data, as security breaches seem to grow more common by the day. Meanwhile, class-action cases — though increasingly confined by recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings — are still something businesses have to deal with in a big way.

The eighth grader’s mom bought him a season pass ahead of time. Alexander arrived at the park and gave a thumbprint to claim his pass. Rosenbach’s mom never knew fingerprints would be part of the deal until her son told her later that day.

Rosenbach sued the theme park under the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act. The 2008 law says how data should be handled for things like fingerprints, voice matches and eye scans. The case was a proposed class-action case for anyone who was ever fingerprinted at that park.

Six Flags was wrong to get the print without first getting releases or flagging that such a scan would be necessary, Rosenbach’s lawyers said.

Six Flags countered that Alexander didn’t get tricked into giving his prints, and argued that his mom even accessed a website which described the tickets as “biometric” season passes.

Friday’s ruling overruled a lower court to say Rosenbach didn’t need to show an “actual injury” other than a violation of his rights under the privacy act. Civil liberty, privacy and consumer groups supported Rosenbach, saying that strict consequences for the mishandling of biometric data mattered more than ever.

Rebecca Glenberg, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, called the ruling “a victory for privacy rights in Illinois.”

The state’s 2008 privacy act doesn’t stop companies from collecting biometric data, but underscored the importance of having informed consent when getting the data. If business models didn’t take that into consideration, Glenberg said, “it seems that business model needs a closer look.”

“This statute is all about giving individuals control over their biometric information. We have seen over and over again how private companies collect this information and store and use it for purposes that the owner of the information has no clue about,” she said.

National and state business groups supported Six Flags, noting, among other things, that finger scans were often how employees now punched in and out.

They predicted a flood of cases if Illinois’s high court sided with Rosenbach.

Robert Cattanach, a partner at Minneapolis-based Dorsey & Whitney who advises companies on cybersecurity law, told MarketWatch the ruling was a break with “the traditional notion that you really have to have something go wrong” to have grounds to sue. “This is a pretty big departure.”

He predicted “copycat” lawsuits and other states following Illinois’s lead.

He acknowledged the importance of data security and compliance, but noted the costs to both businesses and consumers. For consumers, “while it may be in the short term ‘Oh wait, this is great,’ the costs just get passed on for defending these suits.”

Six Flags didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment, nor did lawyers for Rosenbach.

Six Flags isn’t the only theme park to use biometrics. Guests at Disney World DIS, +0.49% are typically asked to do “Ticket Tags,” where their fingerprint is scanned and linked with their ticket or an annual pass. Disney’s privacy policy explains that the company converts the fingerprint image into a numerical key and discards the photo of the fingerprint immediately, so fingerprints are not stored in its system. Guests have the option of using photo ID instead. Disney did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

Interesting. I've never liked the fingerprint scanner at Six Flags but not on any privacy grounds, just because the technology isn't very good. It takes forever to get everybody to scan and really holds up the entrance line. My Pixel 3 has a fingerprint scanner that works really well, from almost any angle. I've tried to trick it and only rarely have had to scan a second time. If Six Flags had one like that, it'd get everyone through much faster.

It'll be interesting to see how this goes. I doubt the actual technology is going to be an issue. It'll come down to how the data are stored. I work with PII every day in my job, and a lot of you do too, and it isn't an issue as long as it's handled correctly. I don't know how Six Flags stores its data, and I'm sure anyone who does isn't going to post it publicly as that generally goes against most company privacy policies. But that's likely what the court will care about.

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